Kevin Ngo's 'Apple HomeView' spec ad: web pages mapped onto 3D glass

Kevin Ngo, whose JavaScript-drawn short films we covered earlier, posted an unofficial commercial for 'Apple HomeView' made with Claude Opus 5.5. It's an imagined product and a fan-made spec piece, not an Apple ad. It drew about 146 likes and 4.8K impressions in its first hours. His follow-up breakdown is the reason we're writing about it, because it lists exactly how the parts fit together.

3D comes from Blender, with free CC0 models, materials and lighting from Poly Haven and ambientCG. The clever part is the screens. Every HomeView screen is a real web page (HTML/CSS/JS), captured frame by frame in Chrome and mapped onto the 3D glass. So the UI animates with code precision, while the device sits in a lit 3D scene. Agents are good at writing HTML and at writing Blender scripts, and this joins the two.

Photographic plates come from Midjourney: stills for the house, porch, snowman, bedroom and family photos, and Midjourney image-to-video for the capsule descent, the splashdown and the doorbell feed. NASA astronaut photos supply the aurora, Chicago at night and an orbital sunset, and NASA Black Marble provides the orbit map. Depth Anything V2 makes a depth map so simulated snow falls behind the snowman, which is a small compositing trick that sells the shot.

For sound, ElevenLabs voices the kid, Mom, Siri and mission control and supplies the effects. The score is 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' (public domain), composed in code and played on CC0 orchestra samples. Look at the rights choices across the whole stack: CC0 assets, public-domain music, NASA imagery. That's a habit worth copying for spec work.

The takeaway for commercial work is a three-layer split. Code does the UI, 3D does the hero product, and generated plates do the world around it. Each layer is editable on its own. The breakdown doesn't say how long it took or how many iterations it needed, so treat it as a recipe, not a one-shot.